Open-enrolment workshops in May and June
We’re running two open-enrolment LLMs Unplugged workshops at ANU over the coming months—same format, different times, so pick whichever suits.
- Thursday 28 May (12:00–14, Canberra time)
- Thursday 11 June (16:00–18, Canberra time)
Both sessions are at the Innovation Space, Birch Building, ANU, hosted by the School of Cybernetics.
The deal is the same as always: build your own language model with pen, paper and dice. No screens, no coding, no maths beyond basic counting and percentages. You’ll walk away with a concrete understanding of how ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and the rest actually work under the hood—the probabilistic nature of LLMs, the importance of training data, and how bias and design decisions can show up in the output.
If you’re writing policy, evaluating AI vendors, or just trying to figure out how much to trust the thing drafting your briefs, this is a good place to start. If you’re an educator, the activities are designed to go straight back into the classroom. They align with curriculum outcomes across mathematics, technologies, HASS and literacy, and the only prerequisite is curiosity.
For ACT teachers: the workshop is accredited by the ACT Teacher Quality Institute as a two-hour professional learning program, so attendance counts toward your annual registered PL hours.
Tickets are on Humanitix—~$230 for industry and general public, ~$60 for educators (requires a .edu email):
Here’s a flyer if you’d like to put one up in your office or tea room.